Student Engagement: What do we know and what should we do?

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It’s an issue of Equity “Disengagement from secondary school – whether a student leaves or struggles through – is a significant source of inequity in Canadian society, not only because it places a large number of students at a disadvantage as they make the transition to adult roles, but because disengagement is disproportionately experienced by students living in poverty, youth with disabilities, and adolescents from visible minorities and aboriginal communities”(Dunleavy & Milton, 2009, p. 4). In an effort to further understand the educational context in which student engagement has grown so popular as a concept, Gilbert (2007) described our current educational system as being only 150 years old and built upon Industrial Age concepts of “mass education” created to “ensure egalitarianism (the idea that everyone should have an equal chance to succeed in life) and the economic need for people with the skills and dispositions necessary for work in the new Industrial Age enterprises” (p. 6). She goes on to say the system aimed to teach everyone the ‘basics” of roughly the same content, in the same way, and then evaluated the students according to set standards and norms as a form of “quality control” – “the main instrument of quality control, at high school level, is the traditional academic curriculum” (p. 7). As pragmatic and generally functional as this model appeared to be, many have argued that “it doesn’t actually produce equal opportunity. This system produces large gaps between the highest achieving students and the lowest achieving students. Large numbers of students don’t measure up to the system’s standards” (Gilbert, 2007, p. 7). These students become disenfranchised and disengaged when they don’t, for any number of reasons, fit in or achieve. The journey towards a fully equitable public education system in Canada has been long and remains incomplete. And as school systems work to resolve issues inherent in a model of schooling designed for the past, the 21st century learning agenda challenges educators to consider new objectives for learning – over and above ways of improving upon existing ones - for all students, in all classrooms and in all schools (Dunleavy, Milton, & Crawford, 2010, p. 1). Thus, it seems accurate that the construct of student engagement was drawn upon first to address the issue of academic inequities for middle and high school students who were not successful finding opportunities for achievement in Industrial Age models of public education, and thus were dropping out. While this purpose and focus of student engagement (school completion) continues to this day, further research into the needs of at-risk students led to student engagement being used as both a means and a measure of improved participation for disengaged students – or to increase a “sense of belonging.” Dunleavy & Milton (2009) speak to this shift – to better meet the needs of disadvantaged students who might or might not have been failing to achieve academically, but were also failing to “fit in” to their school cultures. The notion of “belonging” comes through more strongly in the 1980’s. Student Engagement: What do we know and what should we do? 10
When student engagement first emerged in the late 1980’s, researchers tended to view its “causes” almost exclusively through the lens of a set of demographic and social risk factors attributed to individual students (e.g. family circumstances, influence of peers). Over time, however, the concept and its measures began to shift in meaning as a result of increased attention to the influence of school context, particularly the relationships between school climate and students’ experience of engagement (Dunleavy & Milton, 2009, p. 7). Research into the impact that levels of participation and senses of belonging have on learning continue, as seen in studies by Dunleavy & Milton (2009) and Willms, Friesen, & Milton (2009), and appears to complement academic engagement or achievement strategies. To establish better classroom management Throughout the 1990’s, as research on disengagement and disruption in classrooms was on the rise, student engagement also became useful for gaining compliance or control of an increasingly restless and diverse student population. As an everyday classroom management strategy, teachers could use various teaching strategies (differentiated learning) to engage students in their work – such as group work, PowerPoint or multimedia presentations of topics, and project-based learning. As an aside, research into ways of reaching disengaged students and garnering their interest in focusing on topics instead of classroom misbehavior resulted in a surge of beneficial theories and applications around “differentiated learning.” “Disengagement has been cited as a major cause of deviant behavior at school, truanting, and low academic achievement. (Carrington, 2002; Lamb, Walstab, Tesse, Vickers, & Rumberger, 2004) as cited in Harris, 2008, p. 57). Although moving away from board and book learning and into more “fun” and interesting activities helped engage students and reduce behavioral problems in classrooms, the purpose of student engagement was still to reactively fix a problem and its goal was still to have all students doing what we wanted them to do, learning what we wanted them to learn, but adding some variations to how they learned it. The curriculum remained roughly the same – in content, process, and form of evaluation. The teacher was still expert in charge, using a few extra new tools, and the students followed along as best they could. During this time, the research suggests that we started to pay attention to whether students not only passed and participated but also enjoyed their learning experiences. Shernoff, Csikszentmihalyi, Schneider, & Shernoff (2003) in their study on optimal states of learning found that many students were achieving academically and perhaps even participating in some activities, but were still disengaged in learning. They report, “Even among students who finish the required years of schooling … research has found high rates of boredom, alienation, and disconnection from schooling (Larson & Richards, Student Engagement: What do we know and what should we do? 11
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